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Tashimojo writes "Gamasutra's running a feature entitled 'Nintendo Entertainment System -
Expired Patents Do Not Mean Expired Protection', an interesting read. From the article: 'This article originated when the Gamasutra editors noticed a number of online sources such as Wikipedia stating that it was now completely legal to make NES 'clone' consoles, because all of Nintendo's patents regarding the NES had expired. How true was this statement? We asked game IP lawyer S. Gregory Boyd the question: Are the NES patents expired? If so, is a company free to build and sell new NES-like systems?'"

Well, no. But you COULD play your legally purchased Nintendo cartriges on a no name clone of the Nintendo console, provided that the console did not call itself a "Nintendo", "Nintendo clone", "NES", or "NES clone". The terms "Nintendo", "Nintendo Entertainment System", and "NES" are trademarked. Nintendo could potentially sue over the use of these terms. But the hardware itself is generic.

The NES didn't have any onboard ROM - the entire program was on the cart.

Basically, NES On A Chips are now 100% legal. They're a full 98% (actually, they may not have violated the patents if they're not 100% compatible) NES-compatible chipset on a single chip. Wire in the display on the display pins, the controllers on the controller pins, power on the power pins, and the game on the ROM pins, and you have an instant NES.

Comments like these just go to show how effect the powers that be (e.g., corporations, government) have been at confusing the issue of so-called “intellectual property” with people. This fundamentally makes people less informed and more vulnerable to abuses of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. For example, this reality distortion could easily cause a lay-person to think that if something is patented, they cannot copy it (which is entirely false).

Noone knows but the GBA series were that expensive at least in part because GBA carts are expensive to make (more than ten bucks a piece, I think).

That I don't buy for a second, if for no other reason that a GBA cart can hold at least 128 megabits(FF:DoS) and the largest NES game is 8 megabits (Dragon Quest/Warrior 4). The emulation code takes apparently takes up 31 mbit (I found this by looking at rom sizes for the original NES Zelda (1 megabit) and the Classic NES Series (32 mbit). It's pretty clear by pl

IIRC, Nintendo makes quite a lot of money on their old licenses. Besides the versions they put out for their portable consoles, I believe the Revolution is going to have a sort of classic-gaming-on-demand system in place. They likely want people to pay for their new stuff instead of picking up an old NES or clone console and Nintendo not seeing a dime.

It's not bad for Nintendo to keep an eye on the money, but the patents (AFAIK) refer to the hardware (which Nintendo makes nothing from, today) not to the software (which Nintendo MIGHT make money off). The software is still covered by copyright, so the patent stuff is a non-issue there. The hardware is NOT covered by copyright, so the copyright stuff should be a non-issue there.

Producing a binary-compatiable console that is hardware-compatiable to the NES should (by anything remotely approaching fair and civilized rights) be legal, especially as Nintendo would still be making money off all the things they still make money from. However, the US is dubious on both counts, so don't count on it.

I agree with your post; however,... to what end? I mean, if someone can create a binary-compatable console that plays NES games... I seriously doubt they can do it cheaper than you can buy a used NES for (about $25 last I checked).

They will lose money off the hardware sales of cloned systems if they are trying to integrate a classic gaming interface in their new system.Yes, the basic idea in the story is only about their old hardware, but you don't need an imagination to see the money.

If I have a ton of legal roms laying around, and CompanyA makes a clone console for $20, and CompanyN makes a new console that plays everything under the sun, plus my old legal roms, but charges $300, which will I buy. That depends on if I want to play

One thing: old video game systems will increasingly become difficult to hook up to your TV, since they often don't have a straight video+audio output, instead relying on simulating channel 3 on the VHF band. My TV may as well not have a coax-cable input as far as I'm concerned, and the other day I considered hooking up my old Atari before deciding it's be easier to just forget it. I wouldn't be surprised if my next TV doesn't even have a tuner or a cable-tv input, instead having only SVideo, Component Video, DVI or HDMI or whatever.

So a modern clone of an older game system can provide a nice retro-gaming feel while adding features that make the system more fun to use, i.e. perhaps a built-in library of games, or game-saving features, or wireless controllers, or better integration with home theatre setups, etc etc. Is it worth potentially hundreds of dollars for all these features? Not to me, since I never owned an NES, but maybe to you or someone else who fondly remembers Super Mario 3.

A clone NES would only get you the ability to play old carts. At this point, very few people would bother to buy a cloNES, and also buy a bunch of used carts to play. Thus, the impact on selling downloads of the old games should be negligible. Most of the people who already have a collection of NES games already have an NES, or could get one used fairly easily.

I dunno... in a few years maybe. Look at the Atari Flashback. It's up to a 2.0 with more games... (granted the 2600 is much older, but the point being, there's some market, however small for nostalgia gaming....)

And as the system gets older and older, perhaps the nostalgia crowd will want an NES like they did the old 2600. (The NES being very popular as well..)

Sounds simple to me. Make a box with a dual hardware interface: CF card and Cart.If you have old carts, go at it. If not DL them ala iTunes onto a CF card and play them on your console. 99c a game for old games is cheap enough that people might pay it (or if you're scared of piracy, scramble the DL roms and make the CF socket require scrambled roms). Give a fair cut to nintendo as a licencing fee and they likely will go along with you on the venture. In this case playing nice is good, because even if y

And that is the business rationale for perpetual copyright: If Ron Howard's The Grinch is the *ONLY* movie you can legally watch this Christmas, then innovators like the estate of Dr. Seuss will be well rewarded. Woo.

Yes, I know you aren't advocating perpetual patents for the good of Nintendo.

Good point about this helping to market current versions of Zelda, Mario, etc.

I also think there's a big opportunity for Nintendo to pre-emptively turn this into a cash cow. If they release their OWN "clone" system, they could clean up. They could put together a $35 bundle that had 2 controllers, a small hard drive that had all original Nintendo games, and beat the clone makers at their own game. Even if it was just all games Nintendo made, what gamer geek wouldn't see that as an attractive investme

They already have. It is called the Classic Series for the GBA. They make a lot of money there. They will also have all those games for free to download on the Revolution. So there is good money in it for them to hold that stuff as their own.

Or, pay $50 for one of those shady "700 in 1" TV games, and note that the cartridge port on the back is a Famicom cartridge port. IIRC, Lik-Sang sells adaptors to run NES games on a Famicom (or a Famiclone in this case).

I've seen so many NES knock off "100 in one" game things selling on ebay and in other small video game shops for a long time now. If it is indeed legal for people to make and sell NES like machines now, I wonder what would happen with those. Would they start selling in well known shops?

Story time.I know a guy with a shop that sells upright and cocktail-style arcade games. He sells on eBay and some of his products include 39-in-1 boards with classic games combined into one board - he slaps the board into a cabinet and they sell like hotcakes. (Even better is his customized PC-in-a-cabinet-and-load-whatever-you-want-box.) A while back, his eBay account was suspended because eBay was sent a cease and desist letter from Namco. Apparently they do not approve of these multi-game boards and figh

Obviously, the copyright on the games won't expire for 50 or more years. So no, it isn't legal unless the game publisher specifically says so, since they still have the right to restrict copying of said materials.

Walk into about any mall these days and you will find these really cheap knock-off's of a Play Station design that can play thousands of games. I played Mario Brothers on one. I thought it was just a small operating down here until I went up north and found the same thing, and a bit more funny (side note), they're Colombian. All of them!:o

Last year around this time I saw one in a mall near my place also, and they were demoing obvious Nintendo games on it. Heck, the Nintendo logo was still present in the games. A week after I saw on Slashdot [slashdot.org] an article about Nintendo cracking down on these businesses commiting copyright infringement.
I e-mailed Nintendo about the one in the mall near my place, I never received a reply but they were gone soon after. This year I haven't seen any.

Yo, I am half ass Colombian, pop is from there. And I lived there from age 30-34. I think we should make the rest of the world aware of the saying(dicho) "todo es possible en Colombia" Everything is possible in Colombia.You can get VHS, DVD, SVCD, CD, Games, etc, all copied. You can go into a legit store and have the choice of paying full price for the real version, or a fraction for the copy, what is the word in Colombia, achiviado?

But the parent poster should have realized, that Colombians due to povert

Why should -any- restrictions last beyond the period of time that Nintendo is actively manufacturing and selling the system and/or games for it? What "incentive to create" would Nintendo lose if someone did make clones of an old, obsolete system that stopped making them money over a decade ago? TFA talked about "being aware of comprehensive protections" or some garbage like that-I'd say the more important advice is "learn when to let go." And since that's apparently not possible, the law needs to change.

And what if, say, an oil company purchases the patent for some exciting new fuel technology, and then just sits on it so it won't threaten their business. Seems to me that forcing a company/individual to make an honest attempt to market their product to have any kind of IP law protections MIGHT help some, but fundamentally I think the whole idea of IP law needs to be at least rethought and possibly scrapped altogether.

I would like to see patent holders required to license their patents for extremely reasonable fees. How "reasonable" is defined is a bit of a problem - perhaps accurate research costs must be made part of the application process, and a license is a small percentage of that.

Not knowing much about the patent system, isn't that how it's supposed to work? Either you make money selling an invention yourself, or license the rights to somebody else to make it. Preventing others from making something entirely s

Which is why I propose adding the amendment, "Scratch all that other stuff. Just don't be a dick. And give some cash to the government so they can afford to judge severe dickery and push the guilty out to sea on a poorly constructed raft. And also to build roads."

Well, it -seems- like splitting hairs, but "IP" (meaning "intellectual property") is a misuse of language. Even the Constitution, which establishes copyrights and patents, makes clear that they're not property, they're government restrictions. If we look at them as totally separate from real property, we can easily see the difference-land is naturally scarce, ideas are not. Property rights are necessitated by land's natural scarcity, but copyright and patent are an attempt to impose artificial scarcity wher

"IP Law" isn't monolithic. Different aspects of IP law have different purposes. Patents are intended to encourage and protect innovation. Copyrights are designed to protect creativity. Trademarks are designed to protect brand names. There are many many more fields of "IP Law" that have completely different goals and rules associated with them.In general, "IP Law" is designed to acknowledge that there is value to things other than purely physical objects. Many refer to our current "era" as being the "Informa

Simple, the longer you can play Mario and Zelda on NES, the less you are tempted to play a new version or Mario or Zelda on Super NES, N64, GameCube, or Revolution. If your NES breaks, instead of buying a clone, you have to buy the latest and greatest. If you buy the latest and greatest, quite often you have to buy all new games. That's changing with the revolution which has promised backward compatibility with Gamecube, and PS2 is backward compatible with PS1. But Gamecube isn't anywhere near compatibl

And I'm sure it would very nicely protect Ford's "upgrade revenue stream" if only they were allowed to make parts for their cars, and they stopped doing so after a few years. That doesn't mean we should implement that situation and allow them to do so. So why should we do it for Nintendo? If they want to protect "upgrade revenue", let 'em come out with a product that's worth upgrading to, and a Zelda 5003 that blows away the original. THAT, is encouragement to innovate!

nintendo still plans on capitalizing from their old games and system. the NES was an immensely popular system. Everybody had one, and the nostalgia factor is huge. Nintendo rereleased games for the gba, and as i understand it plan on doing so for the revolution too. from their perspective, there is no point letting people who had nothing to do with the creation of the system profit off it.

besides, nintendo is also planning on selling old 'nes/SNES' games online via a p2p sharing program on the Nintendo Revolution, to try and avoid loosing more market share to sony and microsoft.. At least that's my understanding of part of their strategy to avoid being completely crushed by sony and microsoft. Which considering that the PSP being the awsome portable movie player and porn viewer that it is (and a crappy portable "

I agree with you in theory, but the line of reasoning that Nintendo would use is that they might want to design new products based on their old patents, and they should have exclusive right to do so. For example, they might theoretically introduce a miniature retro-NES which contains NES guts + 200 popular oldschool games all bundled inside a single controller with a TV-out (like the other retro games machines in controller form factor we've seen lately).

### Why should -any- restrictions last beyond the period of time that Nintendo is actively manufacturing and selling the system and/or games for it?While I agree with you on the general point, Nintendo *is* selling NES games, just resently there was the NES classic series for GBA, soon there will be plenty of NES games for the Revolution for download and the Gamecube also had at least all the NES Zelda titles. While the games maybe old, Nintendo is still using them to make money. Sure, they probally won't s

Come on. The article was written for wide public consumption by a lawyer, who makes his living giving advice for big bucks, and can be held liable for bad advice for equally big bucks. Realistically, is there any chance at all he'd come right out and publish a direct answer to the extremely interesting question of whether a specific clone system would be legal? When that's a question he can make large amounts of money answering privately?

Ha ha. What he's done, basically, is give a long-winded "it depends" while strongly implying that anyone who even thinks about getting into this business should begin by hiring a top-notch IP lawyer, such as his own humble self. Golly, what a surprise.

Wait a minute - they're saying that a patent received in 1995 could apply to a product that was created in 1985. It took a long time for that patent to be processed by the USPTO.

I also suspect that the 10NES cartridge authentication system is not additionally a console authentication system: the clone NES consoles shouldn't need to verify that the cartridges are authentic to get them to work.

That leaves it up to trademarks, which I'm sure that it's not to hard work around. You could say that your console "plays games which are designed for the Nintendo Entertainment System (a trademark of Nintendo of America."

Wait a minute - they're saying that a patent received in 1995 could apply to a product that was created in 1985. It took a long time for that patent to be processed by the USPTO.

Development on the NES didn't stop in 1985. Many of the controllers, such as the light gun, were developed afterwards, and have their own patents. Also, mapper chips that gave cartriges features such as additional ROM, battery-backed storage, more sound channels, and so on, were being developed for years afterwards.

I also suspect that the 10NES cartridge authentication system is not additionally a console authentication system: the clone NES consoles shouldn't need to verify that the cartridges are authentic to get them to work.

In fact, the top-loading version of the NES doesn't contain the lockout chip at all; it just leaves the lockout chip data pins unconnected.

The Super NES, on the other hand, did use the lockout chip in both directions in some cases. Games using the SA-1 chip (Super Mario RPG; Kirby Super

The patents on the physical, hardware components of the Nintendo may have expired, but the code programmed into the various ROM's both in the console and in games is protected by international copyright. Those copyrights won't expire within most of our lifetimes, so I think it's safe to say that the "true" NES is protected. Whether or not the hardware could successfully be reverse engineered to yield the secrets of the system's operation for later use with completely new software remains to be seen. Still, though, if any of the original NES's code were reused or even used as an example for a new OS for the NES, Nintendo would have a good argument against whoever was duplicating their systems with regard to copyright rules.

Not only that, but there is already a company bringing an NES clone to market right away here, and it's supposed to have 100% compatibility with both the NES and the Famicom. The only thing left is to wait for the patents to expire.

I've seen the Polystation and similar systems pictured in TFA at one of the souvenir shops at Penn Station in New York, as well as in some of the electronics shops on 8th avenue. For about $50 bucks you get about 100 games built in, so it's a good deal. A friend of mine has an NES clone built into a clone of an N64 controller that outputs to the TV...it also includes an extra controller and light gun that plugs into the main controller, along with 100 or so games. For $35, I bought a Yobo NES clone at the local flea market. You can get the Japanese version from Lik-Sang for USD60. No built-in games, but I don't mind staying partially honest and picking up some old carts for $3-$5 a pop.

Of course, the best part about the NES knock-offs is the hilarious the packaging. "Best Quality" "Super Graphics" "Super 8-Bit Technology"...usually spelled wrong, and abound the box. One particular box had Spider-Man 2 promotional movie graphics and the device was labelled as Spider Game. Infringing upon Nintendo and Marvel IP...now that's some balls!

For about $50 bucks you get about 100 games built in, so it's a good deal. A friend of mine has an NES clone built into a clone of an N64 controller that outputs to the TV...it also includes an extra controller and light gun that plugs into the main controller, along with 100 or so games.

Out of curiosity, what would be the legal ramifications behind selling repairs of old consoles? And how far can you go and consider it still a repair and not a new console? If the controller ports are busted and you replace them with your own components? The logic board, the power supply? All of the electronics, but keeping the external frame? Why can't you replace the external frame with your own design? Wouldn't selling refurbished things like this be legal? I mean, how much can you replace and still consider it a repair or a refurbishing? Everything that is broken, right? And what's wrong with adding your own modifications, such as wireless controllers and updated video out? How is that different than what Messiah is doing [playmessiah.com], other than they probably didn't start out with one dead NES for their new ones?

On a sidenote:TFA mentions that executives of companies can be held personally liable in cases of copyright infridgement (prison!). If that is true and if it can indeed be shown that Sony's CD contains LGPL code from LAME, then they have gotten themselfes into deeeeeep sh*t (although I doubt that anything that drastic would happen).

On the other hand consider the business realities. How many NES consoles did Nintendo sell last year? Is it worth it to Nintendo to fight over an obsolete product?

Given Nintendo's announced plan's for a Revolution download service [slashdot.org] for older Nintendo games, I would say that is a big yes.

On another point, I went to a major mall in the Phoenix area and saw a retailer selling the Power Player Super Joy III Emulator [wikipedia.org]. I was quite shocked to see such a blatant case of copyright infringement at a major retail

"I plan to notify Nintendo's piracy center because it ticks me off that someone is making money by ripping Nintendo off."

Oh please. How about actually doing something useful for society instead? Give blood, write your congressman about how unfair DRM is, adopt a highway, volunteer to help the less fortunate this Thanksgiving, etc.

Writing letters to rat on some retailer who actually provides jobs for people in your area so some multi-billion dollar company can collect a few bucks and also enforce the idea that IP lasts forever is about the last thing you should be doing. If your so insistant on doing something for nintendo how about you look up actual coders and people who made the artwork for those old games and send them a few bucks. At least then your heart would be in the right place.

A $10 replacement connector from eBay fixes virtually every dead NES system out there.

The vast, vast, vast majority of non-functioning NES systems have nothing wrong with them except worn-out connectors. The ones you can get on eBay today are much more solid and long-lasting than the ones that were in the system originally.

i mean they sell old nintendo games on the gameboy, have a nes controller gameboy, they love to rehash old products in new wrapping.
why not just sell old school nes clones. find a way to sell the old games through some medium. they should have done this with the 2oth anniverary recently. a limited run in their factories. god knows everyone would buy one for a decent price.

Copyright and patent laws were intended to protect someone's intellect, and to allow for works to eventually enter the public domain, ideally to benefit society as a whole once the inventer/creator has made some cash off their idea (IMHO... I'm sure that there's some/. lawyer wannabe getting ready to challenge my definition somewhere).

But nothing really happens this way anymore it seems. Nowadays, when the public is supposed to see some benefits from something entering the public domain, the big, money hungry companies [disney.com] just find some greedy, two-faced politician [georgebush.com] who's willing to sell out the people who elected them for some easy cash, and they extend protections, and enact new laws to prevent people from getting what they're legally entitled to.

And it's sad actually... Do you think that when the cpoyright laws were put into place, the lawmakers were thinking planning for this to happen? If so, then why set a duration in the first place?

Actually, the fact that they did enact patent laws to protect the little guys (never mind that it's the guys with the money to twist the laws who are reaping all the protection these days), and they did set terms on copyright shows that at one time, politicians and lawmakers were there for the benefit of the people. Nowadays, it's only millionares(sp?) who get elected, largely due to they're having more money, which gives them more visibility. The laws are now so twisted and full of holes that they're totally meaningless.

And I've seen some arguments in favor of laws extending copyright, and granting new rights to content owners, wherein it's argued that the original types of copyright, and patent laws aren't meaningful anyway, as the people who wrote them couldn't have envisioned what technology would bring to the world, but I think that's fucking insane! This is essentially saying that people who were smart enough to found and develop countries, who studied law, and who developed the world in which we live had no vision, or sense of the future? That's crazy talk...

And this Nintendo thing's a great example of the problem: They made lots of money off the NES, knowing all the while that the patent laws would eventually expire, allowing anyone to build an NES machine, and now that they have (or are, as the case seems to be), they're suddenly saying "but, but, but..." as they see that people still are interested in this technology.

I think it's about time that the laws started working for the people again, and those who try to circumvent these laws should be held accountable for violating them. Copyright limits were not put into effect just so that some wealthy, never-worked-a-day-in-their-lives people, who've inherited millions from their ancestors inventions, can use some of that money to keep you and I from getting what we're entitled to.

But me ranting on my virtual soap box isn't going to change anything, and the population as a whole is too wrapped up in their reality TV, and Paris "Dog face" Hilton sexcapades to realize what they're losing out on. It's just so depressing where we as a society have let ourselves be led to. And the whole while, those passing the laws continue to claim that they're doing so for our best interests.

George Carlin said it best in last weekends HBO special (and more people should watch it, and listen to what he's saying!): "They (the politicians) don't care about you. They don't." It's up to we, the people, to dig us out of the mess that we've let others make of our legal system.

Ok... I'm done. the soapbox is free for someone else to rant on. I'm off to download all the NES Roms I can get my hands on! 8)

BTW - although I'm sure they just meant it as an example, the "10NES" copyright case would have no bearing on developing your own clone console, unless you were specifically designing said console to reject unlicensed cartridges as the actual NES did. The CIC chips on the cartridges authenticate the cart to an official NES, but have no internal connection to the ROMs - failure of the console to implement the authentication would have no effect on playability (you can verify this by cutting the clock pin to the CIC chip in the console*...and play unlicensed carts:) .

*ironically, this is the same method used in many of the CueCat hacks.

5,426,762 -- "System for determining a truth of software in an information processing apparatus".That's the lockout system for non-Nintendo game cartridges. You don't want to include that in an emulator. Expires January 24, 2006, anyway.

5,207,426 -- "Controller for a game machine".Covers the physical design of the game controller. Irrelevant for an emulator.

The reason I come to slashdot is not for the fresh stories, it's for the comments. As much content as Digg has, the comment system is a joke, and the people on there are immature idiots with nothing relevant to say.

You're assuming that people come here for news. I'll let you in on a secret: a lot of us don't. We get our news elsewhere.

The reason people come here is for the bloody comments, and that's why subscribers continue to put up with the "editors", the dupes, the time delay, the left-wing slant, CmdrTaco's whining, and the atrocious color scheme. Digg doesn't have the volume of interesting comments that Slashdot does, and until that happens, you're not going to see a mass exodus.

I don't usually even read these stories as they "break", I let Slashdotters bitch about Sony/Microsoft/eggplants for a day or two and then come back and read what they have to say.

I tell you the reason why I like Slashdot in spite of its flaws, and you respond with a quote taken out of context, and several useless anecdotes, in what I'm assuming is an attempt to change my mind. As I said before, not everyone has the same wants/views as you. This is a hard lesson to learn. However, a few words:

I'm not here for the "broken" mod system or the karma whoring, I explicitly told you I was here for the interesting comments, in BOLD and I couldn't have made it any more clear without thro

Right, you took Linus Torvalds' quote out of context, not mine. I apologize for assuming you could figure out what I was talking about. My quote, you simply ignored.

You point out that "Slashdot's comments are widely considered the weakest part of the site". I beleive I called it a worthless anecdote, not only because such a thing is subjective, but also because you presented it as a fact while citing squat.

You call it "broken", I call it flawed. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Usually it

When Compaq reverse engineered the IBM ROM's (I think that was what happened), they had a lot to gain from doing so and thus invested a lot of money and resources in it. Why invest so much money in reverse engineering an old Nintendo, though, when in order to make up the R&D costs you would likely have to charge more than double what people on eBay charge for used, authentic units? I just don't think the market exists to warrant this type of investment.

Because Phoenix (remember Phoenix BIOS ??)went and legally reverse engineered the BIOS, and licensed them, and Michael Dell and that pony-tailed Gateway2000 guy made a lot of money and hired a lot of smooth talking lawyers.

Software patents were extremely rare in the early 1980s. Nobody would have bothered patenting something as boring as the BIOS.

The IBM hardware was little more than an Intel demo board reference design plus a few assorted kludges thrown together by some recent college hires. Back then, people tended to think that you needed to actually do something clever to get a patent, so IBM didn't really patent much of the PC ha

Then what was fascinating was the people that ripped off Compaq IP to make computers.I have an unauth clone of the original Compaq. Less than 50% hardware match (has to be patent infringed on keyboard tho) with some improvements. Surely the software was stolen and certainly had a unpurchased version of DOS when new. Actually had some good improvements that may have stood on their own.

Terribly interesting as NOTHING inside or outside is labeled above the chip level. Not even any part numbers on anything, eve

Well, because the only way you can get rich innovating is if the law forbids every slacker sitting around doing nothing from immediately copying your invention (or work of art) and (since he doesn't have to pay back the enormous loans you took out to support yourself while developing your idea), undercut you by 50% on price and drive you promptly into bankruptcy.

The term of a century for copyright law is chosen more or less just to correspond to the artist's lifetime. Patent law is limited to about 20 years, that being the time it's considered "fair" to let you dominate the market for your invention. After that, the generics come, and you better have moved on to something new.

Patent and copyright law was explicitly written into the Constitution in 1787 probably because the Founders had unpleasant experience with a world in which patent and copyright law was weak. The result was that the only way for an inventor to control his invention enough to make a decent living from it was to keep the details a deep dark secret. That sucks on many fronts: (1) The invention may well die with the inventor, unless he chooses otherwise, has sons to carry on, et cetera. (2) Good ideas that might be indirectly inspired by details of the invention don't occur. There's no cross-fertilization, where one clever invention (e.g. the electric motor) inspires a related invention (e.g. the electric generator) or a supporting structure (e.g. batteries for small electric motors). (3) The practise of the new invention spreads very slowly, since the inventor must personally trust everyone to whom he teaches the invention. He has no ability to teach strangers to use the invention, or even allow strangers to teach other strangers, because he has no legal way to force anyone to stop using his invention if they start to do so unreasonably. Patent law gives an inventor specific and limited rights to control his invention, and that predictability allows him to trust people more easily and spread the new practise faster.

Patent law is basically a bargain struck between inventors and the public. The public agrees to give the inventor a limited and specific set of rights to profit from his invention, and in exchange the inventor agrees to make the details of his invention public immediately. The key aspect of the patent is the fact that the invention must be completely and thoroughly described before a patent is granted. That means everyone can benefit from understanding the precise details of the invention. Indeed, engineers quite often search existing patents for good ideas that can be developed elsewhere, and frequently find them. It's rare that a good idea leads to only a single worthwhile invention.

Well, because the only way you can get rich innovating is if the law forbids every slacker sitting around doing nothing from immediately copying your invention (or work of art) and (since he doesn't have to pay back the enormous loans you took out to support yourself while developing your idea), undercut you by 50% on price and drive you promptly into bankruptcy.

It should be added that the laws don't just protect a creator from slackers, it protects him from corporations. As much as Disney and Microsoft ab

The term of a century for copyright law is chosen more or less just to correspond to the artist's lifetime.

That may well have been the intention from the start, but the length is now a lifetime PLUS 70 years: a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countri es'_copyright_length">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries'_copyright_length

There is now dispute wether current copyright will ever expire, since the media companies like Disney seem to extend the period when the next deadline is coming